12 December 2007

Since I frequently criticize companies that have done something bad
about privacy, it's only fair to praise the ones who do good
things. Ask.com, a search engine,
has introduced the
AskEraser,
an option to prevent it from retaining any user data, via cookies or
any other mechanism.

One can quibble about some of the details: it may take a few hours to
take effect, the option expires after two years, etc. More seriously,
your queries are sometimes
delivered to third parties, and the AskEraser does not
affect that process. They do claim that you are
protected
by their contracts, but that's not the same
as technical protections.